94 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 23, 1992 the more likely they are not just to flee but to refuse ever to return to lands that the Serbs have taken A Muslim man in Bosanski Petrovac, a town in western Bosnia where Serb forces mas- sacred a large number of Muslims in September, told a field officer from the U.N.H.C.R. that he had been forced by his captors to bite off the penis of a fellow-Muslim. The U.N.H.C.R. official who took this testimony later said he would stake his reputation on the man's truthfulness If you say that a man is not human, but the man looks like you and the only way to identifY this devil is to make him drop his trousers-Muslim men are circumcised and Serb men are not- it is probably only a short step, psycho- logically, to cutting off his prick. From the Armenians to the Jews to the Bosnian Muslims, there has never been a campaign of ethnic cleansing from which sexual sadism has gone missing. And just as those carrying out the ethnic cleansIng seem to feel that they can mutilate their prisoners at will, so they seem prepared to destroy conquered lands, houses, and farm animals. 'We've liberated Radovac," said a Serb fighter home on leave from the front-looking, in his civilian clothes, like any gawky teen-ager from San Francisco or Bremen, and holding his girlfriend close as the radio played an Italian pop tune. Later, I learned that Radovac had always been an entirely Muslim village-some- thing this boy must have known-which meant he believed that its people were not the real inhabitants, however long their tenancy, but interlopers, just as the prisoners his comrades took were not human beings, but beasts. The most lurid tales the Bosnian Muslims had told about the process of ethnic cleansIng-stories dismissed as exaggerations during the spring and summer of 1992- turned out to have under- stated the slaughter. And nothing changed. For outsid- ers who tried to follow events in Bosnia, the same phrases were repeated every night: Sarajevo shelled again; refu- gees massacred again; politi- cians' promises broken again. Where every combat is a mas- other-of incidents in which Muslim prisoners lying on the ground in rows, awaiting interrogation, were driven over by a Serb guard in a small delivery van? Or of the Serb woman who told me that Serb White Eagles had come to her vIl- lage, into her farmhouse, and demanded that her husband kill their Muslim neighbor living across the road? Her husband had refused, and the White Eagles had killed him and, a few mo- ments later, the neighbor as well. The Serb husband was, as Dr. Karadiié's fighters liked to say, a "bad" or "tame" Serb-that is, hardly a Serb at all-and, of course, the Muslims were Mujahedin, not men. An Italian journalist from the Trieste newspaper II Piccolo travelled to a village near Sarajevo that had fallen to the Serbs at the end of August; he was taken by the local commander to a room where, he was told unabashedly, two hundred Muslims had been slaughtered. And then the Serb officer began to complain. The wooden flooring, he said, had been so saturated with blood that he ordered it ripped out and burned. "My men could not be expected to function prop- erly," he said, "with that kind of stench in the air." T HERE is savagery in every civil war. Once blood has flowed, the indi- vidual fighter thirsts as much for revenge as for victory. And since in former Yu- goslavia atrocities have been committed by all sides, the desire for vengeance has taken the form of further atrocities But such excesses are also a Serb war aim. The more terrified the Muslims become, theIr bullets finally land, just so long as they land. A European Community peacekeep- ing monitor stationed in the south- eastern part of the country told me wonderingly what most impressed him about the fighting: "No one seems re- motely interested in digging in." He had recently retired from the British Army (with so many ex-officers from Western European armies among the monitors, rumors persisted in Zagreb that their real purpose was not peacekeeping but intelligence gathering, and the setting up of agents all over the Balkans); part of his incredulity could be dismissed as the contempt professional soldiers from good armies always level at the antics of militias and untrained officers. But he was also well aware that the Serb tactics had their uses if ethnic cleansing was the real goal. 'When you fire an automatic weapon," he said, "the whole trick is to squeeze the trigger and then immedi- ately stop squeezing. Even in that time, some of the bullets will go wide or high. But, of course, these fellows are not aim- ing at other soldiers-they're aiming at the whole village, so you might say that from their point of view, every shot they fire hits the mark." And what they couldn't hit with shells, or rocket-propelled grenades, or bombs, or Kalashnikov fire, they were likely to go after with the knives they could be seen wearing in sheaths in their combat boots or sewn into the back of their jackets. "This is a war to the knives," a Serb soldier told me proudly, and although my interpreter later as- sured me that this was an old peasant expression current among Serbs in the Krajina, many of the worst massacres of Bos- nian Muslims have been carried out with knives, as if the people doing the kill- ing imagined themselves to be slaughtering animals. To the Serbs, the Muslims are no longer human. What IS one to make of identical sto- ries I heard, first from an old man in a Bosnian refugee camp in Zagreb and then from another refugee, fifty miles away in a camp in the Slovenian city of Maribor- two people who could not possibly have known each ''Henceforth, Illingworth, I will expect you to have your act together before you arrive at the office. "